That cannot so much as a blossom yield
In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry,”
or some such saw, this Poet at the Breakfast-table should have affixed to these four hundred pages of incomparable drivelling.
“I talk half the time,” says the poet, in his opening paragraph, “to find out my own thoughts, as a schoolboy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them.”
And what does the schoolboy find there?
Rusty nails, old shoe-strings, copper pennies, dead bugs, crumbs of bread, broken knives, and other trash neither beautiful nor useful. The similitude is just. The contents of the Poet's brain are as precious as those of the boy's pocket; and if we wish to push the comparison further, the wares of both are often of doubtful ownership. The only serious thing in the book is its humor.
“I don't suppose my comic pieces are very laughable,” writes this poet, philosopher, sage; “at any rate, the man who makes a business of writing me down says the last one I wrote is very melancholy reading; and that if it was only a little better, perhaps some bereaved person might pick out a line or two that would do to put on a gravestone.” He has a most infallible instinct for the right comparison; as, for instance: “I love to talk, as a goose loves to swim. Sometimes I think it is because I am a goose.” This is the first evidence of intelligent thought in the whole book. “My book and I,” he informs us, “are pretty much the same thing. Sometimes I steal from my book in my talk, without mentioning it, and then I say to myself: ‘Oh! that won't do; everybody has read my book, and knows it by heart.’ And then the other I says: You know there are two of us, right and left, like a pair of shoes! The other I says: ‘You're a—something or other—fool.’ ” The other I is evidently a sensible fellow. “They haven't read,” continues the other I, “your confounded old book; besides, if they have, they have forgotten all about it.”
Again, the other I says: “What a Balaam's quadruped you are to tell 'em it's in your book; they don't care whether it is or not, if it's anything worth saying; and if it isn't worth saying, what are you braying for?” This is the question the reader asks himself all along, as the evidence that the poet has nothing to say worth the saying becomes more and more overwhelming. This kind of criticism, we know, is little better than trifling; but the performance deserves no other treatment, for we candidly think that a sorrier book could not proceed from a mind untouched.
Why did this Poet, when he meant to write a book, seat himself at the breakfast-table? Did he not know that a full stomach does not argue a mind replete? Had not Shakespeare said long ago that fat paunches have lean pates, or was he not physician enough to know that the mens divinior is not to be found in hot rolls and coffee?
We shall conclude with one other brief quotation from the Poet: